A blog to help inspire organized resistance to the ALP's ill-advised, counter-productive and potentially totalitarian plan to impose mandatory ISP-based filtering on all residential internet feeds by default. This is *not* about the filth they are trying to block. This is about the Orwellian mechanism they are building to do it.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Government blessed smut?

According to the Government's latest FAQ, one of the measures the Government is now proposing is:

(The) Introduction of mandatory internet service provider (ISP) level filtering of content that is rated Refused Classification (RC) in order to reduce the risk of inadvertent exposure.

Without presenting any supporting evidence whatsoever, the Government would have us believe that the probability of inadvertent exposure by adults to refused classification material is high or that the consequence of that exposure, should it occur, is serious. Or both. Otherwise, why would such a draconian measure be necessary?

Suppose we suspend disbelief at the sheer flimsiness of the premise for a second and assume that it is true that adult Australians are, in fact, placed in peril by inadvertent exposure to Refused Classification material like Ken Park or euthanasia texts like "The Peaceful Pill".

Let us suspend disbelief even further and assume that ACMA will eventually discover all the potentially Refused Classification material that exists on the internet. ACMA, however, is not a machine and we are assured that all classification decisions will be subject to due process. Due process, being what it is, takes time. Evidence suggests that ACMA can currently take as much as 64 days to action a complaint.

So, at any given moment, there will be a lot of X-18 rated material (which is not subject to the mandatory filter) and as yet refused to be classified material that adults may be inadvertently exposed to.

Suppose now that an adult Australian is inadvertently exposed to this material. Should they:

assume that any material not blocked must, by definition, not be Refused Classification and is therefore ok to view

An adult electing to report material without first carefully considering whether the material is RC would be highly irresponsible. Apart from anything else, this would flood the ACMA classification machinery with material that probably won't be classified as RC. If the ACMA classification processes are overloaded, they may well fail to detect actually illegal material that should have been referred to police.

Equally, an adult who assumed that any material not blocked is implicitly not Refused Classification, is unlikely to find support from a court which will insist that, as an adult, they are entirely capable of making responsible judgments for themselves.

Furthermore, the Government would surely be distressed if Australians came to believe that X-18+ material, not being subject to a mandatory filter, had an implicit blessing from the Government as being acceptable for Australian adults to view.

Given that abdication of responsible use of the Internet by adults is unacceptable, the only option left (by definition) is for the Government to assume, and indeed, require that all adult Australians who are inadvertently exposed to potentially "Refused Classification" material must act responsibly and decide for themselves whether it is appropriate to remain exposed to such material.

The Porn Report

Highly (though not universally) recommended as a serious attempt to understand the role of pornography in contemporary Australian society, one which debunks much of the moral panic surrounding the subject.

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I reserve the right to remove comments, especially anonymous comments, which attempt to argue the position that possession of child porn should be legal.
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